2 out of 5

Created by: Zoe Lister-Jones

I’m about the same age as Zoe Lister-Jones, the writer and creator of 7-episode series ‘Slip,’ and this fact kept going through my mind as I tried to separate my feelings on the effectiveness of the show versus judgments I was racking up about what our shared age meant, if anything.

It’s hard to extricate the two, though: the show could be said to be a mid-life crises dramady, and there are various interviews with Jones suggesting the thoughts (perhaps) offered in Slip are influenced by her own experiences, if we didn’t want to assume that from her having creative control over it. And it’s one of those series where the point of it is the point of it: it’s got a surface level story of a woman hopping through different versions of her life (which we can thank comicdom for tagging as a multiverse concept nowadays), but the logistics behind that and Jones’ character of Mae’s motivations to get back to her original universe are where Lister-Jones presents us with her questions on intimacy – sexual and emotional – and relationship dynamics, and, like, the point of life and all that… such that the multiverse business is just a vehicle for examining this stuff.

Where I get caught up on the age thing is that the questions and methods of answering them felt pretty shallow. And the problem with my applying judgments from that is that I’m not Lister-Jones – I’m not a woman, I haven’t been married, I haven’t lived her life – and if I feel like I’ve already investigated some of these ideas in my teens or twenties, and have been iterating on them since in more “mature” ways, well… so? Who’s to say if those investigations and iterations had any merit, and if dealing with them at a certain age implies maturity? We all have our own paths, and need space to come to conclusions in our own ways. And I do think I’ve maybe had more room to talk about this stuff – even if it’s just to myself – by dint of being a white male. I gots my balls-swingin’ privileges, taking up space all over this planet.

But. If the point of the show is the point of the show, then I guess I have to ask how effectively it makes its point, and that’s where its perceived shallowness started to rub me the wrong way. Mass media kind of has to be shallow, admittedly, so I don’t expect my exact thoughts to be reflected or justified, and if anything, I prefer when people are presenting their own takes so I can bounce mine off of them, but Slip’s brand of this is kind of a speed run of several different feelings, conflated together and then “answered” together, where the answer is an assumption based on assuming we’re all asking the same question. It’s critical of becoming myopic, and then behaves myopically, and then uses fucking Buddhism as an enlightened fucking calling card (this is also where I get my “this happened in my 20s” bonnet bee) to drop some happy endings on shit. Meanwhile, nothing has actually moved forward; Mae – and perhaps Lister-Jones – has confused the goal of getting back home with it being the solution to her problems. Her journey towards that goal is supposed to teach her life lessons, but in practice, she just body hops through lives of rich ladies, and then smiles at a homeless person when she remembers they exist.

The privilege that’s baked into the narrative is never quite addressed, and a late-in-the-game one-liner explaining how sex is the trigger for these multiverse switch-ups (“my pussy is a wormhole”) seems like the kind of thing you write down first, and then figure out how to justify into the script later. Adding to this, only in the final episode does Mae speak aloud how her allowing herself to pursue pleasure is a key component of things – also something Lister-Jones spoke about in the interviews – but beyond showing it on screen, it’s another apparently huge aspect of the show that’s kind of tossed out there and not actually significantly explored, at least in an emotional context.

This show and tell disconnect, and a lack of broader awareness, is further exampled by the “easter eggs” – characters who appears in different universes in different roles. Oh, you were my boyfriend in Universe A, and are now my barista in Universe B; I knew you in a social group in A, and ran into you on the street in B. Because everything I guess revolves around Mae, if she changes up her life, for sure that means incidental people in her world will have entirely different outcomes. And if I shouldn’t take it that seriously, calling these out as clever winks to the audience is akin to Scary Movie-style humor that quotes from another movie and calls it a joke: there is no layer beyond the surface.

But let’s zoom way out. Slip can be pretty funny. Lister-Jones is of the generation that knows not to take themselves seriously all the time, and so employs some funny cuts throughout the show to undermine any relative victories of her lead – always sort of making her the punchline. And Lister-Jones herself has fantastic comic timing, walking the line between dry and cringe humor quite perfectly. There’s… very much the possibility that the joke’s on me, and the fact that I am reading this all as incredibly surface-level, tunnel-visioned, and naive is the big meta statement of the show, and while I don’t quite think anything in the content suggests that’s the case, the actress’ tendency to dodge out of direct punchlines in favor something a little more grey leaves that on the table. Either way, the stuff that reads as comedy did make me laugh, and that’s down the Lister-Jones’ direction and the show’s editing, which thankfully isn’t too overtly twee, excepting some too-cool needle drops.

I also really, really appreciated the frankness with sex in the show, and Lister-Jones with her body, which is pretty commonly on display in the movie. While the sex feels a little Hollywood, I guess to counter how male-gazey sex scenes normally are, I liked that they were unapologetic about what they were. And I often struggle with figuring out how movies / TV should handle nudity and sexual content – i.e. how can it be enjoyable and, if called for, titillating, without it being sexualizing in undesirable, one-sided ways? Lister-Jones has the answer: you just treat bodies like human bodies. Mae gets topless and bottomless to do the sexing, and then when she wakes up in the morning, well, she’s still topless. And she wouldn’t naturally drag blankets with her to sneak into a shirt, so she’s just up and about in the nude. That comfort is perfect, and should, absolutely, be the template for how it’s handled in general. Whether or not we can balance out the depiction of genders in that way is another puzzle piece, but this was a big one, put in place.

Going by reviews, I realize I’m in the minority on not really liking Slip. A lot of people connected with it. I do feel that we tend to latch on to media as representative when it’s an under-spoken to topic, even if it doesn’t do a great job of representing that topic, and… I’d be speaking for a ton of people I don’t know to suggest that’s the case. But: I don’t feel Slip actually speaks to its various points well at all, and is rather frustratingly narrow-minded about them, to the point of making large chunks of the show ineffective beyond some laughs.